With the success of an application market place like the Apple AppStore™, it is anticipated that Operators and Handset manufacturer will come up with application market places of their own. Application market places—app store or app platform in short—provide an opportunity to reach users more directly than the more traditional approach consisting in populating an electronic device with a ready to use set of applications. However, the exponential growth of applications available on market places creates the problem of discovery of interesting applications for most users.
A device user, such as a mobile phone or smart phone user, has to rely heavily upon rating systems to discover the popular applications in the market place. Today, when a user is looking for an application, he will need to enter keywords based on his interests to search for applications matching these keywords. Using the example of the Apple AppStore™, a user can seek through Itunes™ on his computer for instance or through the AppStore™ application on his iPhone™, for an application using a keyword search. Itunes™ will return a list of hits and the user will have to choose, for instance based on ratings, an application matching his own interests.
A user may need a great amount of time to populate his electronic device, like his mobile phone, with applications he likes and uses frequently. Applications are mostly today app store specific, i.e. an electronic device is generally operating with one given application store. The situation is also true for an operating system (OS) as most operating systems developed for smart phones are associated with a specific application store. A problem arises when a user decides to move to another electronic device operating with a different OS and consequently a different application store. Indeed he will have to populate the new device with the same or similar applications if he wants to retrieve an application environment he is familiar with. As the new app store may be configured differently, he may need to spend again a great amount of time to discover the applications he likes in the new application store.
For example, a user with an iPhone™ or an iPad™ from Apple may decide to switch to an Android™ mobile phone. He may for instance like the New York Times or Le Monde news apps available on the Apple app store. His new mobile phone may be configured to operate with the Android application store. As these applications exist on the Android™ store, he can find them using a manual search. But with many applications available on his former mobile device, this user will have systematically to repeat the search he did on the Apple application store to repopulate the new mobile phone with the same or similar applications.
Operators estimate today that up to a third of their customers when changing phones move to other electronic devices. When it comes to smart phones operating with lots of applications, customers may think twice before changing to a mobile with a different OS, as they are at risk of losing the application environment they like.
There is still a need today to improve the recommendation of applications when a user switches to a new electronic device. There is a further need for a novel recommendation engine that takes into account the applications the user was familiar with on his previous device.